Mandatory vacillations

Aug 25, 2021 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Today, the PNC – Guyana’s main opposition party – is hosting two rallies: one in Linden, the mining town named after its Founder-Leader, Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham; the other at the Square of the Revolution, in Georgetown. Both rallies call on teachers, nurses, doctors, bus drivers and conductors “to down tools and protest for your right”. The advertisements claim “They want to force this vaccine on us and now our children”.

Although both municipalities are overwhelming supportive of the PNC, and although the PNC is the only entity that is actively promoting the events, no PNC leader – top or middle or bottom tier – has clearly associated themselves with the initiative.

That said, the intent of today’s protests is transparent. The PNC has consistently failed so far to create any unifying issue to galvanise is base against, particularly after the humiliating electoral defeat that has sent its Leader into effective social exile after the indecent attempt to rig the elections last year. There is no genuine mass belief among the party’s constituents that they were cheated in the last elections. The attempt to foment socio-political unrest in the wake of the brutal murders of Joel and Isaiah Henry eventually failed. The accusations of racial discrimination have been lacklustre, rhetorical and without any attempt to present documented evidence to either the independent press or to the Ethnic Relations Commission.

However, the controversial issue of COVID-19 vaccination has – as is taking the place the world over – presented a lodestone around which political leaders can and have freight-trained otherwise ineffective political stratagems, preying upon the often legitimate, but often irrational, fears of their constituents, and the PNC leadership has been predictable in this regard. Advertisements for the protests therefore touch briefly on the vaccine ‘mandate’ but are more expansive upon the claims of ‘dictatorship’ and ‘illegitimacy’ of the current political administration. The endgame is a proxy shutdown of government.

The only reason that there are no political ‘leaders’– and the word is used here very generously – sallying forth and branding the anti-vaxx theatrics outright is that in order for the con game to work, vacillation is mandatory. Joseph Harmon and David Granger – both fully vaccinated – cannot come out on stage and now fully decry any vaccination measure because the whole farce would become even more transparent than it already is. The anti-vaxx brigade that is leading the rally is a sort of redux of the Burnham era incorporation of the House of Israel as proxy proponents, fifth columnists and enforcers of the manic, surreal alternate reality of Congress Place. It is the politics of cynicism, of cowardice, and of effective impotence.

It should be noted that, from this month, with full enforcement due in September, New York City is going to enforce a sweeping “Key To The City” measure requiring proof of at least one dose of vaccine for entry into multiple categories of indoor venues. Also, two days ago, the city mandated vaccinations for public school teachers and staff, a measure that was already in place for other categories of city workers. There has been zero pushback against the measure from the New York-based PNC groups, no calling Mayor Bill De Blasio a dictator, no planned marches, not even a single negative comment from the PNC’s favourite Congressman, Hakeem Jeffries, even as these measures are virtually identical to what is taking place here in Guyana, and will be much more effectively enforced.

This is not to say that the Ali government has not blundered at all in how it has handled the vaccination issue. While it has done laudable work on procuring the vaccines, with such a visceral thing such as vaccination in the middle of a pandemic, it has dropped the ball in what should have been a seamless intertwining of an epidemiological strategy with a communication strategy. The reality is that COVID-19 like any pandemic represents an existential crisis to many people, and therefore a chance for opportunistic exploitation along the lines of race, religion, politics and very often the fundamental sense of personal autonomy. If today’s protests are an example of that opportunism at work – and they are – it should be noted that they also present an opportunity for government to observe the major themes of the misinformation being offered, and to fill the gaps in its own communication strategy on vaccination.

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